Child Health and Development

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To reach their full potential, children need high-quality health care and services—especially in life’s early years. Health promotion, safety, disease prevention, and early identification and treatment during these earliest years lay the foundation for healthy development.

Mounting evidence that health during childhood sets the stage for adult health creates an important ethical, social, and economic imperative to ensure that all children are as healthy as they can be. Healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults. FPG's scientists study many aspects of child health and development—from prenatal health to infant brain development to stress management in adolescents.

Featured Project

Early Life Stress and the Environmental Origins of Disease: A Population-Based Prospective Longitudinal Study of Children in Rural Poverty (ECHO) represents the coming together of the Family Life Project—a longitudinal study examining associations between early-life stress and neurodevelopment in low-income and rural populations—and the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, which seeks to understand the effects of a broad range of early environmental influences on child health and development.

Featured Person

Cathi Propper, PhD, is an advanced research scientist at FPG and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the co-principal investigator and co-director of the Carolina Consortium on Human Development (NIH T32 training program) as well as the director of FPG's Developmental Biobehavioral Core, which provides access to state-of-the-art equipment and expertise in physiological and biological measurement.

Featured Project

A longitudinal study lead by Ronald Seifer, PhD, examines psychiatric and health outcomes of well-characterized, very high-risk, maltreated and non-maltreated children. The longitudinal follow-up of this sample at child ages 9-11 includes gold-standard assessments of psychiatric outcomes, health outcomes, and pre-clinical indicators of malfunctioning in the metabolic, inflammatory, and endocrine systems. It is an ideal study in which to examine patterns of stability and change in the regulation of stress-sensitive genes over time.

Current Projects

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A Mechanistic Study of the Association Between Poverty and Executive Functions in Early Childhood: Contributions of Early Brain Development and the Early Caregiving Environment
The current study examines the link between poverty and executive functions (cognitive processes that facilitate learning, self-monitoring, and decision making) which are known to undergo rapid developmental change during the first years of life.
African-Centered Racial Equity Justice Project: Embracing Culturally Responsive Practices to Improve Early Learning and Child Outcomes
This project will develop an African-centered, culturally responsive practice guide with specific strategies, exemplars, and materials with connected professional learning modules to guide effective implementation. The ultimate and long-term goal is to increase Black children’s social, cognitive, and emotional skills (e.g., racial identity, engagement, learning motivation, regulation), leading to strong academic and social competence and school success.
An Effectiveness Replication of Targeted Reading Instruction: Investigating Long-Term Student and Teacher Impacts
This replication study seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of Targeted Reading Instruction (TRI, formerly called Targeted Reading Intervention) in helping grade 1 struggling readers make substantial gains in reading during one school year. It extends prior TRI studies by conducting an independent external evaluation of the TRI, testing long-term impacts for struggling readers into grade 3, and examining teachers’ sustained impacts for three years.
Bright Spots: Strengthening the Education-to-Career Continuum in North Carolina
This project will support a cohort of place-based, cross-sector educational collaboratives ("myFutureNC network") across the state to develop model programs that significantly increase the number of students successfully pursuing post-secondary education and entering the workforce. This pilot aligns with the state's goal of having 2 million individuals between the ages of 25 and 44 with a high-quality credential or postsecondary degree by 2030.
Early Life Adversity and the Developmental Programming of Neurocognitive and Behavioral Risk: A Longitudinal Investigation of Early Childhood Telomere Biology
This study will examine the early biological embedding of health and disease risk in young children’s telomeres, a biomarker of cellular aging. We will conduct a novel longitudinal study to examine the effects of prenatal and postnatal early life adversity (i.e., poverty, parent conflict, maternal stress) on accelerated biological aging, including telomere erosion and epigenetic aging clocks, across the first three years of life.
Early Life Stress and the Environmental Origins of Disease: A Population-Based Prospective Longitudinal Study of Children in Rural Poverty (ECHO)
This project leverages and builds upon an existing longitudinal cohort to propose hypotheses that investigate the ways in which early life stress alters well-specified developmental processes to adversely affect neurodevelopment in childhood and increase risk for obesity and other health outcomes. It extends our prior data collection both retrospectively and prospectively in order to amplify and enhance our focus on adverse exposures and health and behavior outcomes.
Effects of Implicit Bias on Children's Early Outcomes
The purpose of this project is to examine the relationship between implicit bias, teacher expectations, teacher–child interactions, and child outcomes. There are disparities in child discipline and development that can manifest early for poor and/or minority children and can have lasting consequences.
Equity Research Action Coalition
The Equity Research Action Coalition will co-construct with practitioners and policymakers actionable research to support the optimal development of Black children prenatally through childhood across the African diaspora using a cultural wealth framework. The coalition will focus on developing a science-based action framework to eradicate the impact of racism and poverty and all its consequences on the lives of Black children, families, and communities, and to ensure optimal health, well-being, school readiness and success, and overall excellence.
Equity-Focused Research-Action Coalition and Repository Development
The goal of this project is to support the development of an interdisciplinary, multi-organizational research action coalition to identify anti-racist, culturally-sustaining, and asset-focused factors that ensure that Black children, their families, and communities thrive. Specific to this project is the development of a national repository/clearinghouse that provides up to date information on actionable research, practice, and policy evidence about what matters and works for Black children.
Evaluation of ECIC Child Care Innovation Fund
The purpose of this project is to conduct the year 1 evaluation of the ECIC Child Care Innovation Fund. Guided by a racial equity evaluation framework, the evaluation will determine how this fund influences policy changes to address racial disparities in wages and families' access to affordable, high-quality early care and education. This study will also examine facilitators and barriers to engaging in racial equity systems change.
Family Life Project
The purpose of this project is to understand the early development trajectories in both poor and non-poor young children growing up in rural areas characterized by high poverty. An interdisciplinary team of investigators has been following children from birth with measurement of child, family, and school functioning, observed mother and father sensitivity and language input in the home setting, observed quality of instruction in child care and elementary school, characteristics of the community, and biomarkers of child and maternal stress.
Longitudinal Examination of DNA Methylation in Maltreated Children
We are examining psychiatric and health outcomes in a 5-year follow-up of 200 well-characterized, very high-risk, maltreated and non-maltreated children. This is an ideal study in which to examine patterns of stability and change in the regulation of stress-sensitive genes over time.
Packaging and Disseminating the JOIN for ME Program in Low-Income Settings
The JOIN for ME program is a pediatric weight management intervention that can be delivered in community settings, with potential for national dissemination. We will package the JOIN for ME program to increase acceptability and feasibility for delivery in low-income communities and test implementation in two novel settings: the housing authority and the patient-centered medical home. The revised JOIN for ME package will be tested in a rigorous implementation study.
Prenatal Arsenic Exposure and Infant Development at 6 Months of Age: The Role of the Gut Microbiota
Exposure to heavy metals in utero, such as arsenic, may have negative effects on health and neurodevelopment of offspring. In North Carolina, arsenic has been found in the drinking water, making this an important public health concern. This study will be the first to examine the way in which arsenic exposure may alter the microbiome of pregnant women and their offspring.
Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families
The Frank Porter Graham Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families is a suite of programs related to self-compassion in families and schools. Our mission is to bring specialized self-compassion training to teens, pre-teens, children, parents, educators, and all adults who traverse the lives of youth, with the ultimate goal of creating a community embued with greater compassion for ourselves and others.
Rhode Island Asthma Integrated Response Program (RI-AIR)
The RI-Asthma Integrated Response (RI-AIR) Asthma Care Implementation Program (ACIP) is a comprehensive system of identification, screening, and intervention for pediatric asthma. We aim to demonstrate that RI-AIR ACIP is a replicable, evidence-based, and cost-saving model that improves asthma outcomes for children at most risk, and can be disseminated to other urban communities to address asthma disparities.
Starting Them off on the Right Path: Utilizing Home Visiting to Address Race-based Trauma and Support Children's Racial Identity Formation
The purpose of this project is to gather perspectives from current Parents As Teachers families and parent educators. This is a developmental evaluation to understand how Parents as Teachers (PAT) could address race-based trauma and stressors and support the positive racial identity formation for young children.
Student Learning as a Function of Exposure to Teachers' Use of Cognitive Processing Language During Instruction
Given the importance of basic memory skills for success in school, it is essential that we understand the development of a range of component skills that (1) affect the acquisition of knowledge and strategy use, (2) emerge in the context of the classroom, (3) are transformed over time into the study skills that are needed for progress in school, and (4) are related to measures of academic achievement.
The Development of Gut Microbiota and Behavioral Inhibition in Childhood: The Role of Early Stress and Brain Development
The current study will be the first to examine the influence of early toxic stress, including the distal effects of living in poverty as well as the proximal factors of negative parenting and household chaos, on the development of gut microbiome diversity and maturity across 15, 24, 26, and 54 months.
The Power of Language: Does the Quality of Preschool Teacher Language Translate Into Children's Executive Functions?
This project will use secondary data analysis of two longitudinal datasets to test if childcare provider language prospectively predicts child executive functions (EFs) directly or indirectly through child language. We will also examine if different ways of measuring preschool teacher language quality are differentially predictive of child language and subsequent EFs.
The Targeted Reading Intervention: Investigating the Efficacy of a Web-Based Early Reading Intervention Professional Development Program for K-1 English Learners
The purpose of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of an early reading professional development program, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), on young English learners' reading achievement.

Publications and Other Resources

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Appendix C: Changes to the Position Statement, Changes to the Book: Resources and Strategies for Faculty
Published: 2022 Type: Books and Book Chapters
Inner Child of the Past: Long-Term Protective Role of Childhood Relationships With Mothers and Fathers and Maternal Support for Mental Health in Middle and Late Adulthood
Published: November 2021 Type: Journal Articles
Book Babies Randomized Control Study: 2021 Final Report
Published: June 2021 Type: Reports and Policy Briefs
Book Babies Randomized Control Study 2021 Final Report: Executive Summary
Published: June 2021 Type: Reports and Policy Briefs
Black Parent Voices: Resilience in the Face of the Two Pandemics—COVID-19 and Racism
Published: February 2021 Type: Reports and Policy Briefs

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